Luxury Real Estate

Blogged on 2010/04/06 by Ron & Alexandra Seigel

Courtesy of Apple

Do people need an iPad? No. Is iPad a must have? Yes! Therefore, iPad is a luxury.  What makes iPad a luxury is the user experience. It’s tactically interactive. It is eye candy. It is, above all, simple and fun, with endless possibilities of entertainment via the Apps Store. Apple has raised the bar of EXPECTATION in user experience and has thus changed the game.

If you want to gain the competitive edge as a luxury real estate marketing professional, you must become the game changer. Your own website must create an extraordinary user experience and you must provide a superior promise of value as a professional that is newsworthy.

Two days after iPad launched, we had lunch in downtown Santa Barbara across the street from the Apple Store.  People were swarming in and we decided to see what the buzz was all about, up close. Dozens of potential customers were gathered around several large tables testing iPads.  One freed up and we swooped in to play with it.  The experience was joyous; it was easy and very intuitive to use.  For fun, we checked out how our website looked on the screen. It looked great. We turned the iPad sideways (landscape vs. portrait), we made the pictures bigger with gestures. We navigated through pages with a tap of the screen, enlarged images and giggled like kids.  It was an awesome experience for us iPhone hold outs.

On the cover of Newsweek magazine a question was posed:  What is so great about the iPad? The answer was: Everything! Whether or not you agree with its merits, the iPad is a game changer for the competition.  On the back cover was an ad for Amazon’s best selling product, their ebook reader, the Kindle.  Fueled by the hurricane of publicity that Apple commanded (which is a story unto itself) leading up to the iPad launch, 300,000 units sold in one weekend.  This has put Amazon, the market leader in the ebook product category, on notice. They very well may have to settle for the back seat in this market space. The Nook, Barnes and Noble’s “me-too” ebook reader may never recover from a distant 3^rd place.  Other ebook readers are no longer on the radar screen.

If gaining market leadership is your aim, the power and speed of publicity via social media can completely disrupt the competitive playing field and give you the competitive edge “overnight”.  That is, if you have identified an uncontested market niche that you can dominate like Apple, create a new category of service, and thus, create a truly newsworthy story.